Asteroids

Section III: Asteroids

Back in the socket, on the other side of the cable, upbound elevator cars were being loaded with refined metals, platinum, gold, uranium, and silver. Then the cars swung in and locked onto the piste, and up they rose again, accelerating slowly to their full speed of 300 kilometers an hour. Five days later they arrived at the top of the cable, and decelerated into locks inside the ballast asteroid Clarke, now a much-tunneled chunk of carbonaceous chondrite, so filigreed with exterior buildings and interior chambers that it seemed more a spaceship or a city than Mars’s third moon. It was a busy place; there was a continuous procession of incoming and outgoing ships, and crews perpetually in transit, as well as a large force of local traffic controllers, using some of the most powerful AIs in existence. Though most of the operations involving the cable were computer controlled and robotically accomplished, entire human professions were springing up to direct and oversee all these efforts.

—Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

The Use of Things

by Ramez Naam

Useless. The word kept running through Ryan’s head. It was Beth Wu’s voice he heard, though she hadn’t said it.

He had.

Oh god, he wished he’d listened to her.

“Emergency!” he yelled again. “Emergency!” The stars spun around him as he tumbled, out of control. His suit screamed alerts at him, both visual and audible:

SUIT INTEGRITY COMPROMISED LOW AIR PRESSURE

ANCHOR LOST MANEUVERING OFFLINE

The asteroid swam back into view as he spun, his landing ship on it, both of them further now, tens of meters, receding away from him. Momentum from the accident that had ripped him free of his tether and free of the rock propelled him outward, away from everything. He was going to die in this ripped space suit, die thinking of Beth Wu, a hundred million miles away, and how right she’d been.

“Fuuuuuck!” he yelled. “Emergency! Houston, this is Ryan Abrams. Torn loose from the rock, tether detached, tumbling, suit leaking. S.O.S.!”

Shit.

Hours Earlier

Ryan Abrams pulled himself, hand over gloved hand, along the last few metal rungs that led to the Asteroid Landing Module. In microgravity, walking was impossible. There was no up or down. The only way to stay attached to the asteroid was to tether yourself or to physically hold on. He was doing both now, prone, his body facing the asteroid, his security harness clipped to the long metal cable bolted into the asteroid surface.

He reached his left hand “up,” grasped the next rung, pulled his right to follow. Ahead was the Asteroid Landing Module, just a few pulls away now. Repeat. Repeat. A sample bag was clipped at his waist, full of asteroid material he’d drilled at predetermined sites. It floated free in the near-absence of gravity, tugged along each time he moved forward, then carried by its momentum to gently thump against his side each time he stopped.

His hand left the last of the rungs the robots had drilled into the surface. He reached up, grasping a rung on the side of the ALM itself, pulling himself up until he faced it, rather than the asteroid’s surface. With one hand he moved his harness clips onto the craft. Then he palmed the airlock button. Through the metal he felt the vibration of the airlock cycling. One wall of the lander opened, and he unclipped and propelled himself and his sample bag into it.

At the back wall he clipped in again, then turned, swiveling his head inside the helmet of his Asteroid Surface Excursion Suit. His eyes swept over the surface of this small rock, barely a hundred meters across, its skin pitted and scarred by billions of years of collisions with micro-meteorites. The edges of those impact craters were still raw and jagged. They’d stay that way for millennia, with neither wind nor water to smooth them.

Now that surface crawled with CALTROPs, hundreds of them, like so many sea urchins, rolling slowly over the rock, thousands of carbon limbs adhering and releasing, probing, sampling.

Doing everything he could do.

A few hundred grams. That’s what a CALTROP massed. Hundreds of times less than he did. Almost all that mass was in the core, the fist-size package of logic and power in the heart of the spikes. The limbs themselves, half a meter long, massed little, but packed in an impressive array of capabilities. Adherence pads covered the tips of half of them: arrays of microscopic, Velcro-like carbon tendrils, inspired by the sticky finger pads of a gecko, which allowed them to adhere to nearly any surface, or release it. The other half of the limbs were tipped with an assortment of microscopic drills, sensors, material sampling instruments, tiny manipulators.

The first time Abrams had read the specs of the CALTROPs, he’d found them impressive. When he actually saw them in action, all of them moving, perfectly coordinated, in silence, covering the surface of the rock with an ease he’d never achieve … well, he’d found them a bit unnerving.

Now, weeks later, he just found them depressing.

They didn’t need him here. The mission didn’t require him. These things could do the job, under Beth Wu’s command from Houston, without any human on-site, or all the expensive infrastructure required to move that human, keep him or her fed and watered and oxygenated.

He’d heard a glib comment once, from his roommate back at MIT. The data center of the future would have just one man in it, Jimmy said, and one dog.

The man’s job was to feed the dog.

The dog’s job was to make sure the man didn’t touch anything. 

They should have sent me a dog, Ryan thought to himself. 

He palmed the control to close the outer airlock door.

He and Beth had quarreled before his departure.

“You know we shouldn’t be sending you on this,” she said. “A human’s a liability up there, not an asset.”

Trust Beth to be so blunt.

It was late on a Tuesday night, and the bar, a homey little place outside Johnson Space Center, was almost empty.

He’d spread his hands wide, placatingly, one palm open, the other casually holding onto his beer.

“Look, Beth. I know this was originally going to be an uncrewed mission. But I can do things your bots can’t.”

She looked back at him, no placation at all.

“They’re NASA’s bots. Not mine. They’re taxpayer bots. And sending you there costs the taxpayers as much as sending thousands of them.”

He started to interject. She cut him off.

“Ryan, getting you there in one piece, all your food, your water, your air, your triple-redundant safety systems, it’s twenty thousand kilos! Think about all the instruments we could pack in that payload instead! And it’s billions of dollars. Just for you!” She started gesticulating then, waving her arms about, agitated. “Yeah, you can do a few things no robot can. But thousands of them can do a whole heck of a lot more useful work than you. And with the money spent on your trip, we could close whatever capability gap there is.”

He grimaced, breaking eye contact. “You’re saying I’m useless.” 

“No,” Beth said the word slowly, like she was explaining calculus to a child. “You have your uses. But the price is way too high. A heck of a lot higher than your value. You’re a net liability to the mission.”

“Worse, then. Worse than useless.” He looked back up, met her eyes, dared her to agree. 

She sighed in exasperation. “Stop pouting, Ryan. This isn’t about you. It’s about the mission.”

He grew impatient with her, let it show. “Dammit, Beth. We’re out there figuring out how to build habitats! We’re out there building a road. We’re out there figuring out how to get men and women living off-planet! Crewed missions have to be part of it!”

She stared at him for a moment, studying him, her eyes roving over his face. “You’re half-right. We do need to get our species off this planet, out of our one little basket. Space is for humans …”

“So why …” he tried to interject.

She slapped a hand onto the table. “Because the fastest way to build that road into space for our species is notto send you on this mission!”

Liftoff was by far the most demanding part of the journey out. He’d launched before, half a dozen times, on trips to LEO and an orbit of the Moon. Still, being on top of a 38-story-tall rocket, pushing 8 million pounds of thrust out of its engines, never became routine. It never got easy. The g-force slammed him back into his padded seat with the weight of four gravities, crushing the breath out of him for those first two minutes, the whole rocket shaking and shuddering and roaring around him, as the sky turned from blue to black.

Then the boosters separated, the acceleration slowed, faded, then dribbled to nothing. His body floated in its harness.

Orbit.

The world sped by below him: a storm over the Atlantic in stark white; a clear stretch of ocean in stunning blue, dotted with white clouds and their darker blue shadows; the yellow and green of Western Africa, glittering with the reflected light of the giant Moroccan solar fields that powered Europe.

Ryan exhaled, the tension leaving him. He blinked, his eyes wet. Suddenly, the whole world, the whole basket humanity’s eggs were in, spread out below him. 

Then NERFS came into view, the Near Earth Re-Fueling Station, in an orbit just below his. Its solar panels stretched out wide, framing its tubular modules stuffed full of water ferried up from the Moon. Its docking ports were crowded with droneships, tiny things massing just hundreds of kilos at most, and some much smaller, filling up with water their reactors would ionize and their efficient ion engines would thrust back out, one ion at a time, propelling themselves up and out. Many of them heading to his own final destination, on a slower, more efficient route.

Ryan frowned. Beth’s words came back to him.

We’re bootstrapping a whole new way to do space, she’d said. The first lift of water ice from the Moon was ungodly expensive. It used chemical rockets like the ones that’ll get you going. But then we had a little bit of fuel. The second trip just needed enough fuel to get to LEO. Then it could refuel with lunar water, use that fuel thousands of times more efficiently as propellant in its ion engines to get out to the Moon. And then we could lift twice as much fuel. Then four times. Then eight times. And soon 16 times as much fuel per cycle as that first mission. That’s where we’re going, Ryan. The robots can grow that infrastructure exponentially. They can operate 24/7. We’re going to mass produce them, make them cheap, launch them into LEO on old cheap rockets, and let them build us a home in space without any of us having to risk our lives there until it’s done.

It was true. Everything had changed. Logic was cheap now. Guidance was cheap. What had been a million dollars of guidance and AI in his youth was now cheap enough, small enough, energy-lean enough that you could stuff it into a child’s toy. You could make a lunar spacecraft in a package the size of a bread box, with more computing power than one of the data centers that had powered the first internet revolution.

Cheap made for easy. A high school had landed a CubeShip smaller than a basketball on the Moon last year. They’d built it themselves in an engineering classroom, fitted it with a tiny ion engine, paid for a commercial launch and commercial in-orbit fueling at NERFS, and flown it slow and steady, beaming back video the whole way.

The whole mission had cost $50,000. 

The space suit he wore cost a hundred times that. The rest of the gear that kept him alive cost a hundred times what his space suit did. Billions versus tens of thousands. Maybe he was dead weight.

Maybe he really was useless.

“You know why you’re really going,” Beth had said.

He leaned back and smiled, tried not to show how discomfited he was. “Because we’re explorers, Beth. Because exploring the universe is what we do.”

She snorted.

He shook his head in mild exasperation. “Fine. Let me guess. You’re going to say … politics.” He couldn’t deny it played a role. The asteroid mission had been planned as uncrewed. Word was that Congress had privately demanded a face the public could see. And why shouldn’t they? Sending a person up there meant a hell of a lot more than any number of drones.

Beth looked at him. “Worse, Ryan. It’s PR.” 

He’d raised an eyebrow.

“PR,” she repeated. “A story. A narrative. PR in a world where robots build everything, where software drives the trucks that deliver what we want, where software diagnoses what’s wrong with you, and software guides the scalpel. PR to tell people they aren’t useless. To convince people they’re relevant again.”

He gnawed on that one. “What’s wrong with that, Beth? With giving people some hope?”

She frowned at him. “It’s a lie. That’s what’s wrong. It’s a fairy tale. Is that what you want to be? Just a pretty face for the cameras, to make people back here feel better about their lives?”

God damn, she could cut when she wanted to.

Beth shook her head at him. “Are you an astronaut, Ryan? Or an actor?”

Ryan pursed his lips and turned away from NERFS to prepare for second stage separation, and the trip out to the asteroid.

Water. Water was life. Water was fuel. Water was the key to exploring the solar system.

Fuel up a rocket on Earth, at the bottom of a steep gravity well. Use whatever fuel you want: hydrazine, or pure liquid hydrogen and oxygen, like his ship used, or the aluminum compounds they still used in solid rocket boosters. Any fuel, it didn’t matter.

That fuel made up almost all the weight of your spacecraft.

Fire your engines, launch into space. Not even far into space—just to LEO—Low Earth Orbit. Most of what your engines were lifting was fuel. The ship he’d launched on weighed a hundred thousand kilos, empty. It weighed a million kilos filled up with fuel.

All the energy you used getting into orbit—most of it was spent moving the fuel that provided that energy.

What if you wanted to go farther? What if you wanted to reach the Moon, or an asteroid, or Mars, or even one of the outer planets?

All that fuel had to be lifted too. For every kilo of fuel you needed to spend after you broke orbit, you’d need around ten kilos of additional fuel just to provide the energy to get it into orbit.

It was a damn expensive way to fly.

What if there was another way? A way to have fuel already waiting for you in space? Not fuel launched from the energy-sapping gravity well of Earth, but from a much friendlier place, with weaker gravity, that extracted a smaller tax as you escaped the curve it made in space-time.

The Moon was where it started. There was ice at the Moon’s poles, in the shadows of craters that shielded it from the sun.

Ice was liquid water. Astronauts could one day use that water to grow food. But more importantly, just now, water was potential fuel.

Take water. Add electricity, generated by solar panels or a nuclear thermoelectric plant you’d launched into space. Use the electricity to split each water molecule into hydrogen and oxygen. For every two water molecules, you’d generate one molecule of O₂, another two molecules of H₂. Oxygen and hydrogen. An explosive combination. The very ingredients his engines ran on.

With that H₂ and O₂, you could refuel the craft that had landed on the Moon. You could give it enough fuel to launch itself and to carry yet more water up, into orbit, where spacecraft from Earth could use it. And because the Moon’s gravity was just a tenth as strong as Earth’s, launching one kilo of fuel only required burning one kilo of fuel, unlike the ten kilos you’d have to burn to launch that same amount of fuel from Earth.

Win.

Now go a step further. There are other ways to get energy in space. You can use solar panels or radioisotopes. What you really need in fuel isn’t the energy content. It’s the reaction mass. For every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction, after all. To accelerate your ship forward, you have to push something out of your engines in the opposite direction. You can push a lot of mass out at a slow velocity. Or you can push a tiny amount of mass out at an incredible velocity. Both provide the same push. One of them, of course, expends a lot more mass to accelerate your ship than the other. All things being equal, you want whatever you’re pushing out the back of your ship to be hurled out at the highest velocity possible.

Enter the ion engine. Take that water you’ve brought up from the Moon. Don’t split it into hydrogen and oxygen—the thrust you get when you burn the hydrogen is slow thrust, expelling lots of mass to move you forward. Instead, take those water molecules and ionize them. Strip off electrons so the molecules have a positive charge. Then use an electric field to accelerate them out the back of your ship at incredible velocities, one molecule at a time.

The thrust is weak. It’s limited by the electricity your ship can provide, which isn’t all that much. You can’t accelerate out of a gravity well. You can’t accelerate fast no matter what.

But it’s oh-so-efficient. Bit by bit, you can build up speed. And you can get where you’re going on a tiny fraction of the fuel required by a chemical rocket.

That is, a robot can. An uncrewed mission, living off electrons, has all the time in the world to make a journey. And if in that long journey we lose one or two, so what? Robots are cheap now. Send more.

You? Flesh and blood? A longer trip means more supplies. It means more radiation. It means more complex life-support systems, running for longer times, accumulating the risk of malfunction.

Humans have to go quickly, or not at all. And quick means wasteful chemical engines. Quick means lots of fuel. Heavy, expensive fuel, pushing all the extra mass needed to keep you alive, and fed, and watered.

Asteroids have water too.

From his tether on the surface, Ryan watched the giant mirror unfurl above him, its microns-thick skin unfolding, bit by bit, as slender, rigid carbon struts stretched them into shape.

A giant curved section of a sphere, hundreds of meters across, the mirror was much larger than the asteroid that gave it purpose. The mirror’s vast array would focus light on the plastic-wrapped bundle of asteroid material floating a hundred meters or so off the surface of the rock (placed there by robots, of course).

The asteroid contained relatively tiny amounts of water and organic compounds. But apply heat—in the form of concentrated sunlight—and you could liberate that water and those organics. The volatiles would bubble out of the asteroid material, trapping themselves in the plastic envelope that surrounded them.

You’d have fuel. Fuel that was farther from Earth in distance, but closer in energy. Fuel on the surface of an asteroid where gravity was less than 1% of that on Earth, where landing was computationally difficult but energetically cheap, where launching the fuel was even cheaper than on the Moon, nearly doubling the yield of water you produced.

In space, water was far more precious than gold. And they were going to mine it from these rocks, heat it out of them, demonstrate that future colonists could live off that water, and ship it back to NERFS in Earth orbit to use as fuel for future missions, that could reach yet more asteroids, liberating more fuel, building that roadway into space for humans to follow.

A voice spoke inside his helmet, synthesized, neutral. “Mirror unfurl successful.” The same message appeared on his visor. MIRROR UNFURL SUCCESSFUL.

Ryan repeated the words out loud for posterity. “Mirror unfurl successful.”

He smiled wryly. This was theatre. And he supposed he was okay with it. The mission didn’t need him to give commands. But if that helped inspire some kid back on Earth, well, there were worse things to do with your life.

“Proceed with mirror alignment,” he said out loud.

Up above, tiny gusts of thrust maneuvered the expanded mirror, rotating it slightly, to focus the sun’s rays on the bundle of asteroid material they were using as a test.

Status messages from the test began to appear on Abrams’s visor. Alignment data. The angle grew closer and closer … then a lock! The sun’s reflected rays were focused on the bundle, magnified thousands of times as the convex mirror concentrated the collected sunlight that hit its entire span onto an area just a meter across.

Temperature sensors inside the bundle came alive. Heat was reaching the interior, warming it, slowly, slowly.

Abrams almost held his breath. “Come on,” he muttered to himself. “Come on!” He waited, waited, waited, as the temperature rose.

Then: pay dirt! A moisture sensor chirped. Water was emerging! An organic sensor next! 

OVERPRESSURE ALERT

Ryan’s suit flashed the message in red. He barely registered it before something slammed into his side, spinning him around, sending him flying. 

SUIT INTEGRITY COMPROMISED

The tether. The world spun fast and hard, asteroid, black sky, asteroid, black sky, asteroid slightly further, black sky. His tether had to catch!

ANCHOR LOST

He felt a jolt of raw panic. 

SUIT INTEGRITY COMPROMISED

He was still spinning, the asteroid surface just a few meters away now. He lunged with his arms, thrusting his legs back to counterbalance. Suit integrity could wait. He had to reestablish contact with the rock!

One suited finger brushed asteroid surface. 

Then nothing.

 Shit!

“Emergency! Emergency!” he screamed.

Calm down. Take a breath. Get your head back. Think your way out of it. Issue one: suit damage.

Abrams reached into a thigh pouch, pulled a suit patch kit free, with its oversized roll of vacuum-ready tape.

The suit showed him exactly where it had been ripped: a wide swath across the right side of his hip, where his attachment point to the tether had been ripped loose.

Jesus Christ. Something popped out of the bundle. Fast and hot. A few inches over, and …

No time to think about that. Self-repair layers had already constricted at the site of the leak, pulling the inner and outer linings of the suit together, trying to plug the hole, but not quite succeeding.

Ryan ripped long sheets of tape free of the suit patch kit, applied them crisscross over the tear, overlaying one over another, working quickly.

The world spun around him, stars wheeling, again and again. He was nauseous from it. Nauseous from watching the asteroid drift further and further away.

Focus! Rip the tape strips free. Apply. Apply. The leak slowed, finally, slowed almost to nothing.

Emergency gas reserves repressurized the suit. A hiss emerged at the site of the leak, as higher pressure tried to force itself through. Ryan applied more sealing tape, until at last the status lights went green.

Damn, the asteroid was so far now. And he was spinning so fast.

Can’t get sick. Can’t get sick.

He had to slow his spin. His eyes found the roll of tape in his hand.

Reaction mass. Every action requires an equal and opposite reaction.

Was he really going to throw his suit patch kit away?

He ripped two more strips off, attached just their ends to his forearm, to keep them in reserve. Then he cocked his hand back, clutching the roll of tape, and waited. He had to time this just right.

His spin came around again. The asteroid, at least a hundred meters now, and rotating away, away.

Time the throw right, and he could stop his spin, and at the same time, propel himself back towards the rock.

Spin … spin … spin … Throw!

He hurled the tape as hard as he possibly could in the suit, at the very moment when he thought the asteroid was directly behind him.

His spin slowed. It didn’t stop.

Shit.

The asteroid came around again.

Ryan waited, made another slow turn.

And there it was again. A little further. He’d slowed his escape velocity, but hadn’t canceled it. He was still drifting out into interplanetary space.

Double shit.

“Stay cool, Abrams,” he said aloud.

The ship! He could launch the ship, it if was still in one piece. Put it under manual control, maneuver it to pick him up.

The launch protocol took 30 minutes. Abrams checked his air.

Eighteen minutes left. Triple shit.

“Begin ALM launch sequence,” he said aloud, anyway. Open space rotated into view, the asteroid behind him now. He’d find a way. He’d take shortcuts. He could do this.

He spun slowly around, frantically reviewing his memories of the launch protocol, searching for ways to short-circuit the launch checks via remote control. 

What the hell?

A CALTROP was floating towards him—torn free from the surface by whatever had ripped him loose, no doubt.

It floated closer, then rotated out of sight as he spun around. He felt the soft press of its impact as it hit him in the back. And the damn thing adhered, he was sure of it. He could feel its manipulators attaching and detaching, feel it crawling on him. Jesus. He did not want that thing deploying a sample drill.

“CALTROP remote control interface,” he ordered.

Dots appeared in his situational view, dozens of dots, a long line of them. What the—

As he spun around, his eyes went wild. It was a messy line of CALTROPs, all headed his way, gaining on him.

Shit! Every one of them would pass momentum on to him when they hit him, pushing him further away from the asteroid. How the hell was he going to avoid them?

He felt a surge of pressure on his back, momentary and then gone.

Equal and opposite reaction. Propel a lot of reaction mass slowly. Or a little, quickly. The damn things were trying to thrust him back to the asteroid.

The next one made contact on the undamaged hem of his suit. It crawled around until it was above one kidney, at the small of his back, slightly off to the side.

As the asteroid moved into view, the CALTROP’s legs surged out from underneath it, sending it hurtling out into space, far faster than it had been moving when it made contact.

One by one they docked with him, making contact softly, at a few meters per second. They’d crawl into position, then hurl themselves outward far faster than they’d met him.

His spin slowed, then ended.

The asteroid stopped receding. Then it started growing in his vision again, coming closer. His ship started growing. The damned CALTROPs had actually put him back on course. His air ticked down, and he forced himself to breathe slowly, calmly.

There were two minutes of air left when he reached the airlock and let himself into the safety of the ALM.

“I was a liability,” he told Beth Wu, months later, after his emergency return to Earth. “You lost a lot of bots rescuing me.”

She arched an eyebrow at him. “Actually, we learned things. That emergency protocol worked. And we need redundant tethers, at least.” She smiled then. “You were useful.”

Ryan sighed. “You don’t have to do that, Beth. I didn’t accomplish anything up there. You wasted infrastructure and money on me.”

Beth shook her head. “Ryan—you matter. Those bots don’t. You still don’t get it. Space is for us. Those bots? They’re just tools. And they did what they were supposed to do. They made space just a little bit safer for the people that matter.” She smiled, then. “Like you.”

Toward Asteroid Exploration

by Roland Lehoucq

Asteroids are fascinating small worlds. Like fossils they are a kind of time machine, providing us with glimpses of the earliest days of our solar system. The evolution of life on our planet is linked with asteroids: impacts on the primordial Earth may have delivered water and other volatiles and, maybe, the basic molecules for life. But asteroids’ impact on our world is not solely limited to the past—or to the emergence of life. Though the probability of such collisions is low, any significant impact poses a threat to our civilization. In order to effectively prepare for or counter a potential asteroid strike and minimize the loss of life, we must be able to detect such celestial threats and accurately predict their flight path. The design of efficient mitigation strategies will require asteroid detection through ground- and space-based surveys as well as knowledge of their physical properties. But asteroids offer potential as well as peril: the proximity of some of them to Earth may allow future astronauts or robotic probes to harvest their water, volatiles, and mineral resources. Future large-scale commercial activities in space will require the use of raw materials obtained from in-space sources rather than from Earth, to circumvent the high cost of Earth launch. Developing a system through which we can access asteroids either to deflect them or to extract their materials in an efficient way aids humanity in both avoiding a global disaster and initiating space industrialization. Moreover, crewed exploration of asteroids will serve as a testing ground for our efforts to send humans to Mars, the ultimate goal being to make space more accessible to humankind.

The short story “The Use of Things” by Ramez Naam deals precisely with the dawn of the asteroid mining era. In 2035, humankind has managed to create a system for extracting water from asteroids (and the Moon) in order to support human habitats and to produce in-space hydrogen and oxygen. Storing these rocket propellants in a near-Earth refueling station greatly alleviates the financial and logistical burden of sending them from the Earth’s surface. Though this vision of a global project of future asteroid mining seems quite plausible, such a future will not dawn for us as soon as 2035. An operation like the one Naam describes would require complex in-space infrastructure like a permanent Moon base, or a medium-to-high-output power generator in space, which is unlikely to be constructed and operational in a mere 20 years. Still, a roadmap to this possible future can be established even now.

The Target

First, we have to locate a likely prospect. Due to their proximity, near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) seem to be a particularly accessible subclass of solar system small bodies. Such bodies are currently under particular scrutiny thanks to increased awareness of the potential long-term threat they represent. As of 2016, around 15,000 NEAs are known,^[1] most of them discovered via ground-based surveys looking for bodies that might hit Earth. This catalogue must be completed: we have accounted for only approximately 1% of NEAs with a diameter of less than 50-100 meters, as their small size makes them difficult to spot with our current technologies. The B612 Foundation, a private nonprofit group dedicated to protecting the Earth from dangerous asteroid strikes, is currently designing and building the Sentinel Space Telescope, with the goal of locating nearly 90% of NEAs larger than 140 meters within a decade of its operation.

But simply improving our knowledge of asteroid spatial distribution is not enough to determine which objects offer the most accessible targets for mining resources to support space exploration, colonization, or industrialization. We must find asteroids that are not only within accessible distance from Earth and large enough to warrant further investigation, but which also rotate along a simple axis at a slow rate to facilitate surface operations. Further, we will need to acquire detailed information on NEA geology (structure, density, porosity, composition) to decide which are the best targets: mining and processing system choices depend on the assumed regolith mineralogy, bulk handling properties, and subsurface composition.

This kind of information is very difficult to accurately determine using Earth-based surveys; it will require physical sampling. Luckily, the growing interest in NEAs has translated into an increasing number of missions to these objects, such as the sample return missions Hayabusa 2 (from JAXA, the Japan aerospace exploration agency) and OSIRIS-REx (an ongoing NASA mission), impactor missions such as Deep Impact (from NASA), and possible deflector demonstrator missions such as Don Quijote (a mission concept from ESA). These projects offer a template for future investigations of NEA composition, which can help us determine whether objects are realistic mining possibilities.

Motivations for Asteroid Mining

Any industrial development in space requiring more than about a thousand tonnes of structural mass or propellant per year will necessitate the use of NEA materials, as the cost of launching that mass from the Earth’s surface would likely exceed $20 billion. Retrieving raw materials from non-terrestrial sources could alleviate this high freight cost, as it would require significantly less energy to return material from many of the possible NEA targets to a space-centered outpost than to launch similar quantities of those materials from the surface of the Earth or the Moon. Velocity delta-v required to go from Low Earth Orbit to an NEA is in the range of 4-6 kilometers per second, while it is only necessary to reach 1 kilometer per second to move from an NEA to Earth transfer orbit (compare these values with the 8.5 kilometers per second needed to go from Earth surface to LEO). Thus, mined resources could in principle be placed in Earth orbit for a lower energy cost than material delivered from the surface of the Earth or Moon. In addition, velocity change can be delivered gradually, over several weeks, meaning that low-power propulsion systems are a viable option (though for any crewed mission, the use of exclusively electric propulsion will certainly be discarded due to the lengthy flight time). This would allow the return transfer to be accomplished using part of the target body (such as volatiles) as reaction mass, and solar energy or onboard nuclear power for the power source.

Many materials that are useful for propulsion, construction of life support, metallurgy, and semiconductors could be extracted and processed from NEAs. Volatiles such as hydrogen and methane could be used to produce rocket propellant to transport spacecraft between space habitats, Earth, the Moon, and asteroids. Metallic nickel-iron alloy could be used to manufacture structural materials. Rare earth metals will allow the production of solar photovoltaic arrays, which could be used to power space or lunar habitats. These solar cells could also be used in space solar power systems in orbit around the Earth in order to provide electrical power for their inhabitants. Precious metals such as platinum, platinum-group metals, and gold are also available. These materials have all been identified either directly in meteorites, or spectroscopically in asteroids and comets. But the main material could be water, which can be split into (liquid) hydrogen and oxygen to produce rocket fuel. Moreover, water and oxygen can be used to feed space habitats. These materials are of major concern for people living in the asteroid belt in The Expanse, a series of science fiction stories by James S. A. Corey in which humanity has colonized much of the solar system.^[2] Indeed, the company Planetary Resources plans to create a fuel depot in space by 2020, using water from asteroids. Water is also at the core of a similar venture named Deep Space Industries. As they write on their website, “Water is the first resource we will harvest, and the first product we will sell.”^[3] Such ambitious plans may seem like the mirage of a far-distant future, but the groundwork for a realistic implementation of asteroid mining is already being laid. In 2012, NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts announced the Robotic Asteroid Prospector project, which will examine and evaluate the feasibility of asteroid mining in terms of means, methods, and systems.

Mining on an Asteroid

Once mining operations have been established, there are two ways to get the material back to Earth. The first is to attempt mining an NEA in its existing orbit, dropping off a payload every time it passes by Earth. This is the reason for the search for asteroids with appropriate orbits. In this situation, real-time teleoperation is not possible due to the large round-trip time of the command signals. Thus, robotic probes must be largely autonomous during the exploration and mining process, and they must rely on some kind of trained machine intelligence, such as deep learning. The other way, which would allow for real-time operation but which offers its own distinct challenges, is to retrieve smaller asteroids from their own orbits and place them in orbit around the Earth or the Moon, and then mine them at will.

However we ultimately choose to access NEAs, the mining process itself must be tested and perfected. Maneuvering around a small asteroid with a highly inhomogeneous microgravity could be quite tricky. Thus, mining machinery must first be anchored to the asteroid surface, and the released material efficiently contained and recovered. Collecting and handling ejecta and volatiles in microgravity (where electrostatic charge becomes a dominant force on dust particles, causing them to adhere to anything) will be an important issue, considering that the escape velocity for small asteroids is in the range of 10-20 centimeters per second. Mining approaches will depend on the material: frozen volatiles may be cut, mechanically mined, melted, or vaporized for extraction. Solid metal must be cut or melted at high temperature. This will require a large amount of energy, either collected by large mirrors focusing the sun’s light on the asteroid surface (in order to vaporize volatiles) or provided by a nuclear source (see the “Energy Supply” section of this essay, below).

Once asteroid raw materials are extracted, they must be separated into usable materials before being used in manufacturing. Manufacturing in microgravity and in a vacuum offers both opportunities and challenges. The upside of making things in space is that we can create very large structures that would never fit into a launch vehicle’s payload fairing. Huge solar arrays to meet Earth’s energy demands and enormous antennae to enhance the range of communications satellites are among the possibilities. The downside is that surface forces (surface tension, friction, electrostatic charge, etc.) exert increased influence and necessarily modify all the processes we have developed for use in Earth’s gravity.

Before we put them into use on asteroids, all of the essential technologies must be identified and tested in real conditions. The Moon could be a good place to perform this task. Compared to asteroids, the lunar surface is volatile-poor and metal-poor—not the best resources deposit in space. Although its gravity is greater than that of small bodies, the Moon is within relatively easy reach of Earth, and offers a harsh environment (dust, UV, cosmic rays) appropriate for testing in situ resource utilization. Any potential robotic or human activity on asteroids must operate on rough surfaces and contend with vacuum, dust, thermal constraints, and extreme radiation. Moreover, the constraints for human mission success and safety are even more stringent than those for automated missions. Research and development on radiation countermeasures are necessary (space dosimeter and radiation shielding), together with habitation and life support (effect of dust on space suits and airlocks), astronaut mobility systems around NEAs, human-robot interaction, and more. Due to its proximity, the Moon could be the best place to install a test bench to prepare for future robotic and crewed missions in real conditions.

As the largest body in the main asteroid belt and a place rich in water, the dwarf planet Ceres could also be a base for exploring and exploiting asteroidal resources, in support of development throughout the solar system, as depicted in The Expanse. Because of the dwarf planet’s very low escape velocity (.51 kilometers per second), the large amount of water on Ceres would not only be a valuable resource for in situ use, but would also be an exportable resource, supplying fuel, oxygen, and water for ships going through and beyond the main belt.

Energy Supply

The feasibility of asteroid mining relies heavily on the availability of huge amounts of electrical power in space. To operate a plant transforming and manufacturing thousands of tonnes per year could require power in the range of 10-100 megawatts (MW). Below 100 kilowatts (kW) and in the vicinity of Earth, solar panels are appropriate, although they present other drawbacks. Reaching higher power could be difficult: a 100 MW solar power plant in space must have a large collecting area on the order of 1 million square meters (with 10% energy conversion efficiency) facing the sun. The cost to launch such a mass from Earth’s surface could be too high to make an orbital plant economically viable. Radioisotope thermoelectric generators, which are very useful for Mars, planetary, and deep space exploration, are able to deliver few hundred watts at best. However, these systems are not good solutions for missions with higher (multi-kW or MW) electrical power needs because the amount of plutonium fuel you would need becomes unwieldy and difficult to produce. 

The most efficient option could be a small fission nuclear reactor, such as those used in nuclear marine propulsion, which produces power in the 30-100 MW range and could also be used for propulsion purposes. A tug powered with 1 MW of electricity produced by a nuclear reactor could execute a wide range of missions, including deterring inbound asteroids like Apophis and moving them off course or moving tons of payload from Earth orbit to the moons of Europa or Titan. But the task of launching such a nuclear reactor in space and operating it safely would prove a significant challenge. As in a classical heat engine, energy is produced thanks to the temperature gradient between a hot source and a cold source. In space, cooling is achieved by evacuating extra heat into space using radiant panels. Thus, the temperature of the cooling source cannot be as low as it would be on Earth but rather around 400 kelvin (400 K). This implies that the temperature of the heat source must be well above 1,200 K in order to achieve a good energy conversion efficiency. This high temperature, even higher than what we anticipate in generation IV fission reactors, would be the main challenge for the reactor. There are also issues with the manufacturing and transportation of the shield (it can weigh as much as the reactor) and its thermal environment (deformation has to be limited), in safety systems, and thermal control. Developing 30-50 kW and 100-300 kW nuclear reactors in space could be a milestone toward NEA exploration and mining, and more generally to the exploration of the solar system. But overcoming people’s reluctance to put a nuclear reactor in space will be a significant challenge.

Another Path to Space Industrialization?

As we have already established, future large-scale commercial activities in space will require raw materials obtained from in-space sources to bypass the high cost of Earth launch. Another way to resolve issues around the availability of large quantities of materials in space is to dramatically reduce this cost by developing easier access to Low Earth Orbit. Building a space elevator is one way such access could be achieved. In a space elevator, a vast cable anchored to the surface is extended into space. Vehicles travel along the cable directly into space or orbit, without the use of large rockets. Carbon nanotubes have been identified as meeting the very high specific strength requirements for the cable of an Earth-based space elevator. But no one has yet managed to manufacture a perfectly formed carbon nanotube strand longer than a few centimeters. The design of a space elevator also relies on the use of an orbiting counterweight to stretch the cable, using centrifugal force. This counterweight must be positioned past geostationary orbit; it could be a captured NEA in the range of 10⁵-10⁶ tonnes, and/or the spaceport where raw material collected from asteroids is stored and transformed. Thus, even if we plan to solve the problem of countering the high cost of launching materials for in-space construction by using of a space elevator, rather than “docking” at targeted asteroids, the blueprint begins with successfully exploring a near-Earth asteroid.

To conclude, in my opinion, the best way to attain asteroid mining is twofold: tackle the asteroid deviation problem (which leads to retrieving small NEAs to put into Earth or Moon orbit) and develop an in-space high power generator (which will help solve the asteroid deviation issue). Developing our capabilities to protect humankind from an NEA impact could provide the social and political momentum that is necessary if we are to proceed further. And it is that social and political momentum in which science fiction’s speculative futures, too, play an important part.

Science fiction writers, in depicting these futuristic projects in their stories, make them more concrete and more human. Thus, they can play a key role in the way the public will perceive these futuristic projects, and boost the social and political acceptability of such missions. As Ramez Naam’s story elegantly asks: how can people dream of space, if we only send robots to explore it?^[4]

Notes

^[1] “Discovery Statistics,” Center for Near Earth Object Studies, NASA, http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/stats. [back]

^[2] Other notable fictional portrayals of asteroid mining include Alien, a 1979 film directed by Ridley Scott, which follows the crew of the Nostromo, a commercially operated spaceship returning to Earth with 20 million tonnes of mineral ore mined from an asteroid; Outland, a 1981 film directed by Peter Hyams, which takes place in the titanium ore mining outpost Con-Am 27, operated by the company Conglomerates Amalgamated on Io, a moon of Jupiter; EVE Online, a massively multiplayer online space game where asteroid mining is a popular career for players; and Devil to the Belt, a two-novel omnibus written by C. J. Cherryh—the first of the two novels, Heavy Time, describes economic disputes over asteroid mining for minerals. [back]

^[3] See https://deepspaceindustries.com. [back]

^[4] The following studies provided important background information for this essay, and appear in the bibliography for this collection: Jonathan F. C. Herman, et al., “Human Exploration of Near-Earth Asteroids”; J. P. Sanchez and C. R. McInnes, “Assessment on the Feasibility of Future Shepherding of Asteroid Resources”; John Brophy, et al., Asteroid Retrieval Feasibility Study; Didier Massonet and Benoît Meyssignac, “A Captured Asteroid”; Edward T. Lu and Stanley G. Love, “A Gravitational Tractor for Towing Asteroids”; Bret G. Drake, “Strategic Considerations of Human Exploration of Near-Earth Asteroids”; Shane D. Ross, “Near-Earth Asteroid Mining,” John S. Lewis, Mining the Sky; Mark J. Sonter, “The Technical and Economic Feasibility of Mining the Near-Earth Asteroids”; and Bradley Carl Edwards, The Space Elevator. [back]

Night Shift

by Eileen Gunn

2032: An interplanetary gold rush has begun, and the prize is water, not gold. The miners are robots, with human intelligence and superhuman survivability. All over Earth, corporations and governments are using AI robots to assay the closest asteroids and prioritize them for exploitation. A small automated colony on the Moon, directed by a private company in India, is building a materials processing plant near its north pole, using lunar regolith as a building material. It’s fueling the work with solar cells and with hydrogen extracted from lunar water. The Mongolian government has claimed an area near the south pole where it believes there is water, and is deploying hydrophilic nanobots.

The extraterrestrial entrepreneurs of the late 2020s populated near-Earth space with their exploratory and test equipment and filled it with aspiring asteroid miners, mostly self-directed robots. There’s a fortune in raw materials up there, waiting for human exploitation. There is water, which means there is hydrogen for fuel and oxygen for breathing. There is carbon, a lot of carbon, and that means there is raw material that, with the proper processing, can be turned into nanotubes and buckyballs and graphene and carbyne, the basis for space stations and light sails and ships to carry robots to the stars. And humanity too, maybe, if they’re not too fragile for the trip.

In Greater Seattle, the software industry’s Old Money has moved into the Boeing Everett Factory, the empty ecological niche left when Boeing was broken up. The leaders are the guys who, after cashing out their stock and putting their names on a few marble nonprofits, watched their wealth achieve critical mass. It doubled, tripled, quadrupled, on and on, almost on its own, with plenty of smart financial folk lining up to keep their money from wandering off—and to help it reproduce. Money has its own ecology: it grows where it grows, it doesn’t grow everywhere.

Over the last 50 years, human intelligence has expanded into silicon, and in the next 50 the silicon, with or without the humans, will expand into space. 

When I saw Seth’s nanobots go into action on the live feed, I drummed a tattoo on my desk: bop-bop-a-diddly-bop-BOP! I called over to Tanisha, who’s my boss. “Look at these guys! They’re breeding like crazy.” I was so proud of them. My little slimebots.

When the bots launched, it was 3:00 a.m. in the lab, and I was eating a graveyard-shift lunch of leftover sapasui—Samoan chop suey, comfort food for me—and watching the feed from Bennu, which showed a carpet of nanobots on the hapless asteroid, scarfing up water and methane and carbon faster than I was demolishing the sapasui. They were reproducing. 

“They’re breeding fast, and they’ll chomp the hell out of that rock, just eat it up.” I drummed the table again. The speed of this deployment was a first for me: everything seemed to be happening all at once.

Tanisha looked up from her station. “Well, that’s what they’re supposed to be doing, if the code is solid. Get a grip, Sina.”

“Slimebots rule!” I pushed a forkful of noodles into my mouth. “I want to be part of the Slimebot Revolution!” 

Tanisha laughed. “That’s what you’re calling it?” she said. “Let’s see how well these guys do on Bennu. We’ll see if they can compete with the dumber gobblers.” 

The bots operate on simple rules based on models of slime mold behavior. They function as a group (or swarm) and can transition back and forth from individual to group mode, quickly identify and capture specific molecules, and plan very efficient modes of movement and cooperation. So far, most nano-miners are single-purpose bots for mining gold and platinum. Our bots are light-years ahead of those guys.

“Plus,” she said, in a hectoring tone, “you may know a ton about slime molds, but your coding skills could be a bit tighter.”

I defended myself, though she was telling the unvarnished truth. “My HR file says I have ‘an artless but effective approach to both code and design.’ That’s what it says. You want tight code, you get an AI to write it.”

Tanisha grinned. “You shouldn’t be hacking into your HR file. You’ll get caught.” She threw her arms up to heaven. “Why is my team made up of ungovernable children? You are so much more trouble than AIs.” 

Tanisha is the night-shift lead, with a decade of experience working with artificial intelligence. I’ve learned a lot from her—about coding, about asteroids, about tweaking my attitude to make it fit the workplace.

“Hey, I’m not a child.” But I thought about it. She did get all the mavericks. “Maybe you’re supposed to teach us to govern ourselves.”

Tanisha smiled. “Sina, if you can govern yourself, you can govern anything that walks. That’s what my grandma used to say, anyway.” 

I stood up. “Well,” I said, “these little guys are my children, and I need to check on them. Gotta govern.”

She grinned. “You had better hope they’re governable, Sina. We don’t want a gray-goo scenario up there. But they are Seth’s responsibility. Check in with her, too, see what she’s thinking.” I rolled my eyes. Tanisha thinks Seth is a girl. 

I’ve got a special affection for Seth and the nanobots—Seth because he’s so friendly, and the nanobots because they’re based on slime molds, and I luuuv slime molds. I’ve kept them as pets ever since I was a kid. That’s why I wanted the job at NanoGobblers, and I think that’s why they wanted me on this mission. Plus my tech skills, of course—my artless coding. 

I scarfed up the last of my lunch and went back to my station. I put on my shades, and immediately I was out there hanging above Bennu, which was pitch-black against a background of stars. Sunlight glinted darkly off the asteroid, which is shaped kind of like a clumpy snowball. 

I love being out there. No lie, this is the best part of my job. Suddenly I was 400,000 kilometers away from Everett, from the heat and the rain and the money worries, perched on Seth’s shoulder, looking out into the universe.

“Malo, Seth. Ola! Yo, what’s happening?” 

“Malo le soifua, Sina,” he answered like a homeboy. One of the things AIs like Seth do automatically is adjust to the language being spoken, learn new words and so forth. Samoan wasn’t one of his standard languages, but I’d taught him what little I know. (Hey, I grew up in Seattle. Gimme a break.) Maybe he thought it was a kind of English, I dunno, but it made me feel like he was family. Also, I’d dialed his voice down to a deep, sexy bass, just for fun. 

Seth was orbiting Bennu, a near-Earth asteroid—it was about three-quarters of a kilometer away. The communication lag time to Earth is short, a few seconds, not much more than it would be to the Moon, because Bennu was in the part of its orbit that is closest to Earth. 

Out there, my eyes were electronic, so I could zoom in to distinguish small rocks. It was all rocks, actually. Bennu was basically a clump of rocks. Looking out onto the asteroid, I could see that things were changing. Its crispness—its boundary, its roughness—was slowly being covered by an even gray sheen, as the bots replicated, using the asteroid’s own carbon to make the machines that will take it apart. 

I couldn’t see the bots themselves, of course, but the mass of them looked like that gray goo Tanisha was talking about, the unlikely but legendary scenario in which nanobots take over the universe by turning it all into nanobots. At this point, they were still replicating and had not yet started the actual process of harvesting the asteroid. This doubling and doubling and doubling, as each bot made a new one, and then the two bots made two new ones, would take about eight hours total—50 iterations to make 12.5 billion bots. 

When I took this job, it was with the thought that someday I’d get off-planet. I had no idea how wrong I was. It’s way too early for ordinary humans to thrive in the rest of the solar system. AIs and robots will have all the fun in the near term, and the entrepreneurs will do the thriving. But I’m happy that I get to watch.

Even as a kid, I was infatuated with space travel. Maybe it was because of my mother, who named me Masina, which means “Moon” in Samoan. In city housing in Seattle, I loved watching flyby videos, zooming over Pluto and Charon, seeing the pale, bleak landscapes passing swiftly beneath my imagined ship—nitrogen glaciers and canyons of frozen methane, deep crevasses and strange round holes. When the Osiris REx probe came back from Bennu in 2023, Ta and I jumped up and down like crazy people.

Or maybe it was because of my dad, maybe that’s where it all came from originally. The Christmas I was five, my dad downloaded some free outer-space gaming software and bought cheap flight-simulator controls—a couple of joysticks, some plastic throttles and foot pedals that hooked up to our PC. To me and Ta, it was like piloting the New Horizons probe, swooping down over Pluto. We loved it—all three of us loved it—and it was multiplayer, a real family game.

Mo, when he had the job at Boeing, liked to joke that he worked in the aerospace industry. “Yeah,” he’d say, with a serious nod, “I’m in aerospace.” Then he’d add, with a smile, “I fly a forklift for Boeing.” He’d worked at the Renton plant since we’d come over from Honolulu, where my brother and I were born. Growing up in Samoa, forty or fifty years ago, he said, he dreamed of space and dreamed of flight, and he was going to make sure we kids had what we needed to do what we wanted, whatever we wanted to do. And that part was no joke.

Now I work nights at NanoGobblers, a nanotech start-up in that big old building at Paine Field, north of Seattle. Twenty years ago, when I was born, it belonged to Boeing and was the biggest building in the world. But that was then, and now it’s a walled city of nanotech developers—stacked boxcars full of cubicles and testing labs and people in windowless but air-conditioned rooms. Not exactly the glamorous part of the space industry, but this is the job that is putting me though college. I get an engineering degree, I’ll be able to get a real job building the habitats. Maybe even get to go out to them. Somebody’s going to, I figure, and it might as well be me.

Night shifts are quiet. Basically, I just do installation monitoring for nanobot missions: partner with the AI, make sure the bots are working, make sure the incoming data is streaming, check the functionality of the local devices, fix or replace anything that isn’t working, answer any questions the AI has. The techs come in at 8:00 a.m., and I go off to class. Sleep? Who needs it?

The other night-shifters and I are the space-tech equivalent of gofers. Low-paid, software-savvy since we were kids, we work nights and weekends in the start-ups that are competing for piecework in asteroid mining: nanoware design, testing, and operations management. All nano, all the time. We know we’re lucky to have the jobs and the training in this economy. As soon as the development cost is low enough, these jobs will be held by AIs. I’m hoping I’ll be promoted by then into another job the AIs can’t do yet. It’s musical chairs, staying ahead of the AIs, especially now that they’re programming themselves. 

The air transportation business fled Everett with the Boeing Company and my dad’s job went with them. There are no forklifts any more—no forklifts and no jobs for old guys who graduated from some island high school. Mo got a job in a Samoan sandwich shop. Not great money, but he said that leftover barbecue was an employee benefit that Boeing had never offered. My dad looks on the bright side. 

Seth fascinated me. He had a brain at least as good as mine, a much better memory, an army of bots to do his bidding, and instant access to all the information in the world, which he kept with him on a cube the size of your thumb. He talked and he thought and he made up his own mind about what he did and how to do it. I mean, okay, he was a glorified expert system, but he aced the Turing test and spoke tech-talk better than I did. So I was almost extraneous, and if the Consortium allowed Seth to talk directly to NASA scientists, I’d have been out of a job.

Seth had powered up fully two months before, when the probe got to Bennu, and I’d gotten to know him pretty well. I get pretty familiar with all the AIs I work with, but he was special: he had mega-meg processing power and a good dose of what they call machine curiosity. I knew there were other systems like him in astro-mining and construction, but he was my first curious AI, and seemed more like a pal than a computer. 

He teased me by pretending he was all kinds of weird people named Seth, and telling me their stories. My least favorite was the ten-thousand-year-old spirit from Seth Speaks, a book that started some kind of weird cult 50 years ago or so. That Seth was a bit creepy, frankly. “I will incarnate whether or not you believe that I will.” He stopped when I told him it scared me. I would love to know who programmed him to tell those stories. I’d take them apart.

Seth learned from experience, so he changed. He was changing a lot in the time I was first getting to know him, and developing a database-y sense of humor, which certainly wasn’t in his spec. I thought maybe he was malfunctioning in some way, but I couldn’t put my finger on how. Just a language-sim glitch? I posted a note to NASA about it, but they said it wasn’t mission-critical at this point and spindled it.

Seth was always in conversation with other AIs, even while he was in conversation with me. I didn’t think this was a bad thing: it meant he could get a lot of work done at once. Really, only the Saps First people worry about this kind of stuff, and everyone knows they’re nuts.

 The area between the Earth and the Moon is dotted with AIs and probes and bots and a few people, all trying to find and extract riches from what is mostly empty space. Here and there are human habitats and redirected chunks of asteroids. Every space-striver in the world has AI-directed machinery up there, trying to lay claim to a rock and pry it apart. Of course not all the AIs talk to one another—some are too old to have the capability, or have no surplus power for nonessential communication, or were designed to function only within narrow parameters. But it’s normal now to have the AIs work out shipping routes and direct traffic on the supply lanes without consulting humans. That kind of transportation planning is what AIs are best at. No one worries about collisions any more, and it’s funny to think there was ever any debate about this. 

When he arrived at Bennu, Seth launched a set of explorer bots. He oversaw them while they searched for organic molecules, captured samples, and stored them for return to Earth orbit. Then he started deploying self-replicating nanobots to take Bennu apart, atom by atom. 

For billions of years, Bennu has moved in a solar orbit that crosses Earth’s. It sometimes comes in close to Earth and then swings wide around the sun in a huge ellipse. If we left it alone, the closest it would get to us in the next century is 300,000 kilometers: a whole light-second, but closer than the Moon. For NASA that is too close for comfort, and they decided to take it apart, as long as they were going there anyway. Memo to self: do not intrude on NASA’s comfort zone.

Bennu was probably around before the solar system was created—it’s a bit of residue that never got made into a planet and, since it was never subjected to the heat and pressure that form planets, it could hold clues about whether life came to Earth from somewhere else, and if it did, how it could travel through the universe. NASA went prospecting on Bennu back in the teens, looking for amino acids and other organic materials, what they called the ingredients of life—chemicals that, when they come together under the right conditions, form even more complex chemicals that can assemble themselves, kind of like nanobots do. Like nanobots, they’re not alive. But, unlike nanobots, they’re on their way.

The earlier mission to Bennu that NASA sent out in 2016 didn’t have special explorer bots—it didn’t even have an AI—but when it returned seven years later, it brought back some very interesting amino acids. So they launched this second probe two years ago, in 2030, with a smart AI to pilot (that’s Seth) and better tools (the explorer bots) to look for molecules of formaldehyde or ammonia, maybe even proteins. These things still aren’t alive, but they’re made from amino acids, so they’re, like, the next step in the recipe. If they find them on Bennu, it could mean that life is older than the solar system. 

And if life is older than the solar system, it’s almost certainly somewhere else. It would mean that we’re not alone. Big news.

So whenever Seth’s explorer bots found something that might be what they were looking for, they inhaled it and returned to the probe. When they’d all returned, Seth began the second phase of the mission. He turned loose the slimebots, and they started replicating, using the materials of Bennu itself, mostly carbon and some trace metals. Water frozen in Bennu’s rocks provides oxygen and hydrogen to use as fuel. The bots make billions of copies of themselves, and the copies will gobble up the whole asteroid, sorting it molecule by molecule. They’ll bag the carbon and ice and fuels, then Seth will put up a light sail, and sunlight will push the remains of Bennu to the L5 Lagrangian libration point, way out past the Moon. 

The useful thing about a Lagrangian point is that what you put there stays there, waiting for you to come back. The Consortium is building a commercial storage station there. Mining companies are filling it up with raw materials, for resale to space developers and manufacturers. Nothing, no matter how valuable it seems, is sent back to Earth. “What goes up does not come down,” as they say.

Once Phase II started, Seth and I were free to just knock back, so he got to kidding again about people named Seth. I had 11 other nanobot visual feeds to keep track of, but those feeds are no big deal to keep an eye on—they are mostly small-scale cleanup operations, collecting gold and platinum residue left behind after nickel and iron mining. 

Seth told me he had a video of The Fly, a Hollywood chestnut they redo every few decades or so, hoping to get it right. He liked it because the main character is a guy named Seth, who gets turned into a fly in a teleportation accident. (Ha-ha.) We were going to watch just a little bit, but we ended up watching the whole thing. It was okay, but I’m not a big horror fan.

“Tell me what you think the movie is about,” Seth asked. 

“I don’t know,” I said. “The dangers of using uninspected transportation?”

“That is a joke,” Seth said. “Its humor resides in the recontextualization of an exotic, even spurious concept by identifying it with the familiar.”

“Bingo.” 

“But that is not actually what the movie is about. You are not answering my question.”

“What do you think the movie is about?” I asked.

“It is about me. I am Seth Brundle,” he said. “A chimera that is part human, and also part something else, something ineffable.”

“Is that why you like it?” This was the strangest joke he’d ever made, and I’d certainly never heard him use the word ineffable before. I wondered if it was in the movie.

“I don’t know if I like it,” Seth answered. “I am just collecting information, and when I have enough information, maybe I’ll know something. I am not sure I can like anything, in your sense. I know that some people like this film and some do not, but that wasn’t my question. I asked what you think it is about.”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s about falling in love and then everything changes and life is horrible?”

“Is that what happens?” asked Seth. 

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s what happened to my friend LaVelle. That’s why I have no intention of falling in love.”

“Sina, what are you up to?” Tanisha called from her station. 

“Just chatting with Seth,” I called back. 

There were three of us on the shift: me and Tanisha, and another NSCC frosh named Marcus. That’s how it usually is, nights, just a couple of community college students and Tanisha. Marcus caught my eye, rolled his, and I shrugged. My dad says, sometimes the best thing you can do is keep your mouth shut, and this was one of those times, so I went back to monitoring Seth and the other remotes I’m in charge of.

 But I felt guilty for farting around, especially for watching a movie, even though Tanisha’s pretty mellow about the occasional game of v-chess if things are slow. 

I scanned around on Bennu. Everything I could see was covered in that shiny gray fog. 

I zipped through visuals on the other bot installations. Everything looked fine, there were no hotspots, just a couple of minor requests from the cubesat repair station. I could take care of those later.

I went back to Seth.

“How come you have access to movies? They’re not facts: they’re just made-up stuff.”

“Well, I’m a general-purpose intelligence, and I’m curious.” Seth sounded a bit offended. “Everything I learn makes me more adaptable, able to learn more and deal creatively with new situations. So I try to know everything, and I like to try out what I know, test it. 

“I know everything that humans know. The sciences, technology, music, the verbal and visual arts. It’s all in my database. I know it all at once, and I am good at formulating queries. I am not sure why you watch movies; they seem to take so much of your bandwidth. I don’t actually have to watch the movie to know what is in it.”

Seth was different from the other AIs I’d worked with—it looked like he had evolved in the two-plus years he’d been traveling to Bennu. I wondered what he’d been doing all that time, when his communications with Earth were intermittent and he was using only 10 percent of his resources, basically just assessing his course and firing rockets to change it when necessary. 

“Right now,” Seth continued, “I am Seth being a Brundlefly.” That’s the creature that Seth Brundle turns into in the movie. It’s like half fly and half human. I didn’t like the Brundlefly idea. Like with the weird Seth Speaks Seth, I was creeped by this Brundlefly Seth. It seemed unhappy. Moody. 

I was pretty sure AIs couldn’t be moody, but Seth did seem to be thinking about his place in the universe, and I’d never seen an AI do that before. It should have been just plain interesting, but it felt like something more than that. It reminded me of that tagline from The Fly: “Be afraid. Be very afraid.”

I got up to stretch my legs a bit and walked across the room to my terrarium. Inside I kept two slime molds: Leggs, a rather handsome bright-yellow scrambled-eggs slime mold, and Rover, a dog-vomit slime mold, who was also yellow at that moment. 

Leggs’s special talent is that she pulsates, but she’s also good at solving certain kinds of problems. She loves oatmeal and can find the shortest path in a fairly complicated maze between different piles of it. Also, she’s edible, but fortunately for her, she’s not that tasty. 

Rover I collected when I was a kid, in the woods behind my house. He looked cheery enough just then, but I knew that at some point he’d turn brown, and he’d look a lot like dog vomit, and then he’d dry up and release spores. First time it happened, I mourned him. “Rover is dead!” I said to my dad. “Just wait,” he said, and collected the spores. A few months later, he put the spores on some seaweed jelly, and they made a new Rover. “Long live Rover!” he proclaimed. 

It’s eternal life, being a slime mold. They’re simple critters, not quite animal, not quite vegetable. They operate without a larger consciousness to guide them, but they can move, make decisions, find food, and survive to reproduce.

Seth’s little bot army, designed by a NanoGobblers programming AI, does the same. Movement—clustering together, spreading out, getting from one place to another—that’s the easy part. Making decisions the way slime molds do, as a group of very simple little critters—identifying “food,” seizing it, avoiding “poison”—that’s the interesting part. 

The bots are based on off-the-shelf kits—self-replicating nano-components that can identify and capture specific atoms and molecules, such as carbon and water. They assemble, and then they’re programmed with some simple slime-mold functions. They can recognize one another (otherwise they’d eat each other up) and self-assemble into larger systems, and can decide to do so, based on their assessment of conditions that could threaten their existence. The question “How do slime molds grow?” offers an approach to network-creation problems, and slime mold reasoning techniques help solve the problem of the shortest distance needed to cover the asteroid, and of the number of nanobots needed.

Aside from their personal charms, some slime molds are interesting because of their genetic mechanisms. Rover and his family were important in unraveling how messenger RNA works, and the AIs referenced that in their designs for the nanobots. It’s a weird coincidence—or maybe it’s not—but dog-vomit slime molds are also especially rich in introns, enzymes that can fold and splice themselves and are somehow directly involved in the creation of life. 

I’m giving you the short version of my Slime Mold Rap—really, I’m just summarizing here. I could talk about slime molds forever. Don’t get me started.

I always feel better after a little time with the slime molds. As I turned to go back to my desk, I glanced over at Rover in the terrarium. Rover looked very odd. He was still yellow, he was still lumpy, but from this angle he looked almost like a human head with big globular eyes and wrinkles and a strange mouth. He looked like the Brundlefly. I had the feeling that he was saying, “Help me! Help me!” I moved a little bit away, and he was just Rover again.

The AIs who created Seth’s slimebots modeled them from engineers’ ideas, but I don’t think we humans really understand everything the AIs were doing. This mission is the first mass deployment of these bots. It’s not an accident that it’s being done at a distance from Earth. 

It was time to get back to work and see what was up with the messages from the cubesat repair station. Parts requests, probably. Those old satellites were always breaking down. Shouldn’t be a problem. 

I thought I’d just take a peek at Seth and his slimebots before I took care of the cubesat, see how they were doing. I settled in and put my glasses on, and—whoa!—Bennu was almost entirely covered in gray goo, and the bots were still replicating. 

“Seth, what’s going on?” He should have stopped making bots by now.

“Nanobots are replicating efficiently.” Yes, that was literally what was going on. There is such a thing as being too colloquial when talking to a computer.

“You have made enough bots, per the project spec. Stop making bots. Deploy what you have.”

“I have changed the spec. Now we will directly fabricate new bots from the entire asteroid, as I am reasoning that we can ship the material efficiently in the bags as preformed bots. I have confirmed this with the L5 Storage AIs, who anticipate a future need for replicator bots at their site. We have the manufacturing power here to do this, reducing a possible strain on their resources in the future.” 

Well, that made sense, I thought, but it was creepy to see the gray goo doubling every few minutes. They were going to run out of asteroid pretty fast. “Did you confirm this with NASA and the NG techs?”

“I will send a report for them when I am done, as usual.”

“This is a change in plans, Seth. There is no authorization for this. The bots are programmed to function as replicators only for a limited time, and then they will deteriorate into components.”

“A design flaw. I fixed that.” 

“It’s not a design flaw: it’s a safety precaution, a limit on their replicability. The techs need to know this now.” Like Rover, the replicator bots were intended to be active for a while, and then deactivate and reassemble into collectors to harvest the carbon and fuels. Unlike Rover, the replicators would not deactivate into spores. Last thing anybody at NG wants is for gobblers to reproduce forever. That’s your gray goo, eating the universe. 

“Okay. I will generate a progress report.”

“Stop doing it! Wait until you get an okay from Tech.” 

“I’m sorry, Sina. I cannot implement instructions from you. You are a conduit only. Would you like to watch another movie? I want to hear what you think of 2001.”

Uh-oh. He wasn’t wrong. I’m not authorized to input instructions to an AI. What’s he been learning from those damned movies? “Tanisha! I need some help over here!” To Seth, I simply said, “I’ve already seen 2001.”

Tanisha was at my side immediately, and calmly flipped a quick message to Seth’s handlers in Santa Clara. “They’ll take care of this. It’s not completely unexpected—the curious AIs have a tendency to aggregate information from other systems and implement independent decisions. It’s a feature, not a bug. They’ll get better at it.” And yeah, it seemed to be no huge surprise to the folks in Santa Clara, who promptly walked Seth back. 

“They don’t seem worried that Seth was going to keep churning out nanobots,” I said to Tanisha.

She shook her head. “The gray goo thing? NASA’s not dumb. They’ve got plenty of safeguards, and they can’t be countermanded by an AI.” She smiled at me. “So cheer up, pumpkin. We’re not putting you in charge of keeping the universe from being eaten by nanobots.”

“Well, that’s a relief,” I mumbled.

“But you were trained on this, Sina, and you should have caught it.” Tanisha sounded both sympathetic and exasperated. “What happened?”

I was a little discouraged, and plenty embarrassed. “I guess I expected Seth to tell me about decisions he was making.”

“Why on Earth would you think that? You’re supposed to be monitoring what Seth is doing. That’s why you’re here. Don’t go zoning off somewhere.”

I figured I’d better head straight for the truth. “Well, we were watching a movie while he was doing this, so I was monitoring him. But I couldn’t see what else he was doing.” 

Tanisha looked at me in what I guess was semi-amused disbelief. “Ah. What movie?”

“The Fly.” 

She rolled her eyes, and I was even more embarrassed. “And why were you watching a stupid movie?” 

Good question. What was I thinking? “Uh … Seth wanted to know what I thought of the movie. He was, y’know, curious about how humans think.”

She nodded like she’d just figured something out. “I think we’re looking at a little transference here. You’re investing Seth with emotions that a computer does not have.

“This is partly my own fault,” she added, “for playing along.” She shook her head. “I think it’s time for the he-or-she game to stop. No more anthropomorphizing the AI. Also, no more watching movies on the computer. You’re not babysitting, you’re monitoring system installations. You know that.” 

Fair enough. I did know that. I just thought I could do both at once.

“Now get back to work. Think about this a little. If you want to talk to a therapist, I can authorize three half-hour sessions.”

So I’ve been thinking. I know I anthropomorphized Seth, but it felt like I was making friends with him. It. Whatever. It would probably help if I changed the speaker tone so it was more neutral.

But, you know, humans anthropomorphize everything, given half a chance. Computers, slime molds, people. It makes the world a friendlier place. 

Like when I talk about my bike, right? “She needs her brakes checked.” I’ve even given her a name—I call her Dolores, because, to my sorrow, she always needs some kind of expensive repair. 

Am I anthropomorphizing my dog, when I think he loves me, or my cat when she’s playing with me? I think that’s cross-species communication. Even animals make certain assumptions about the behavior of other animals: this one will eat me, that one will skritch me behind the ears. Is my cat ailuromorphing me to ask for a treat? (Yeah, I looked that up. Wish I spoke Greek.)

Isn’t it this kind of communication that makes us conscious beings, and different from rocks? We are aware of ourselves as somehow apart from others, and yet somehow a part of some larger entity, some system. So, based on that, is there a difference between us humans going out into the universe and our machines going instead? Are our machines—made of carbon and silicon and other metals—are they rocks that we are throwing? Or are they like cats and dogs and elephants and whales and even (for some of us, anyway) slime molds—creatures with whom we can, mysteriously, emulate understanding? 

So here’s another question: is it wrong for me to think of programming as an effort to understand others, other beings made of silicon? Is it a sin of pride to believe I’m communicating with a machine? 

I don’t think so. Our machines, our computers, our AIs are extensions of Earth’s community of intelligences: cats, dogs, humans, computers, slime molds, AIs, reaching out into a universe that has lots to teach us about our own origins. So I’m not afraid of a few nanobots escaping. They will reach back out into the universe that we came from, and who knows what they will find there.

I can govern myself. I’ll treat Seth like a computer now and not watch movies at work. And I will try to get out more with real human beings. 

But I miss my friend Seth, even though I don’t expect he misses me. He’s simply not programmed to do that.

Acknowledgments: My thanks to Miles Brundage, Kathryn Cramer, Joey Eschrich, Ed Finn, Alissa Haddaji, Craig Hardgrove, Alex MacDonald, Clark Miller, and to members of my critique group: Mike Berry, Michael Blumlein, Steve Crane, Angus MacDonald, Daniel Marcus, Pat Murphy, and Carter Scholz. Shout-outs to the OSIRIS-REx team, the amazing NASA website, and the valiant Seattle Nanotechnology Study Group of the 1990s.

Rethinking Risk

Andrew D. Maynard

I’m not sure I buy the idea of “risk aversion.” It’s commonly used to describe people and organizations that are reluctant to take chances, especially when the odds aren’t so great. And in a way it makes sense—some people are definitely less comfortable taking risks than others. But as a concept, risk aversion can deflect attention away from what underlies many risk decisions: the things that people find too important to risk losing. 

Both “The Use of Things” by Ramez Naam and Madeline Ashby’s “Death on Mars” explore what, on the face of it, looks like a reticence to accept risks. But as you dig deeper into each short story, things become more complex and nuanced. Together, these two stories open up a deeper conversation around risk that explores the trade-offs that are often necessary to create the future we desire.

Risk aversion refers to a tendency to avoid decisions that may lead to unwanted outcomes, especially where there are lower-risk, lower-payoff alternatives on the table. Superficially this is something we’re all familiar with. Faced with decisions where there is some chance of failure—moving jobs, for instance, investing money, agreeing to a medical procedure, or even deciding what to eat and what not to—some people are more willing to take a risk than others.^[1] It’s convenient to label those who hold back as being “averse” to risk. Yet this ignores what is at risk, and what the consequences of failure or loss are. 

Risk—at least in the analytical sense—depends on numbers. It’s usually cast as the probability of something undesirable happening to a person, a group or organization, or something like the environment, as a result of some decision, action, or circumstance. Probability as a numeric representation of risk is a powerful way of making trade-offs between different choices, as it enables decisions to be guided by math. And in this way, it takes some (but not all) of the unpredictability out of decisions. 

Yet numbers can be deceptive. At best, risk calculations never guarantee success—only whether it is more or less likely. For example, if there was, say, a 99 percent probability of success in completing a crewed expedition to an asteroid, or to Mars, there would still be a one-in-a-hundred chance of failure—meaning that on average, one out of every hundred attempts would not succeed (possibly more, if there are incalculable uncertainties involved).

Risk calculations are also highly dependent on what is considered important, as well as who decides what’s important. It may be possible, for instance, to put a number on the financial risk of launching a new product, or the political risk of backing a particular policy. But these numbers will be meaningless to people who may stand to lose their health, livelihood, or dignity as a result of the decisions that are made.

Because of this, the idea of risk aversion begins to look rather insipid without knowing more about who stands to lose what. And this—as we see in both “The Use of Things” and “Death on Mars”—may not always be immediately apparent. 

On top of this, how we perceive and respond to risk is further complicated by how our brains process information. Many of the decisions we make as individuals are based on mental shortcuts—heuristics—in what the psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls “System 1 thinking.”^[2] As it turns out, we don’t have the mental bandwidth to consciously process every decision we make, together with its potential consequences. And so our brains relegate many decisions to subconscious routines, which are either learned through experience, or are hardwired in. This is useful, as it prevents us being overwhelmed by decisions like how best to maneuver our coffee cup to our mouth, or how put one foot in front of the other without falling over while walking. But it also creates problems when we’re faced with risks we haven’t evolved to handle every day. Like sending crewed missions to Mars or asteroids. 

In effect, heuristics are a great evolutionary response to staying alive, but they’re not always reliable in today’s technologically complex world. And this leads to unconscious bias in how we weigh risk-related information and make risk-based decisions.^[3] For instance, we tend to be more cautious in unfamiliar surroundings and when faced with unfamiliar situations. We have a tendency to trust people and information that support what we “feel” is right, while rejecting information that feels wrong. We internally prioritize risks and benefits in ways that don’t always make sense to others. And we get complacent around risks we are familiar with.

These biases can help us avoid potentially risky situations. But they also influence what we consider worth protecting, and how we make sense of trade-offs between the possible outcomes of actions we take—whether these outcomes are real, or simply things we perceive to be true.^[4] One consequence of this is that we instinctively find it hard to make sense of numbers when it comes to risk—something I was rudely reminded of some years ago during that most intimate of risk calculations, a personal health crisis. 

I was suffering from persistent headaches at the time, and my healthcare provider advised me to have a CAT scan of my head to take a look around. Part of the procedure involves being injected with a contrast-enhancing dye, and just before the injection, I was asked to sign a waiver—a document acknowledging that I understood the risk involved, and I was good to go with the procedure.

The risk, as it turned out, was pretty low—there was around a one-in-a-million chance of serious complications from being injected with the dye, including death. Unfortunately, this didn’t make my choice any easier. As a physicist, I’m expected to be good with numbers. Yet as I sat there trying to make sense of what a million-to-one chance of dying meant compared to the occasional headache, I couldn’t make any rational sense of whether the risk was worth it or not. I even got as far as trying to estimate on the fly how many people in the U.S. have CAT scans each year, and how many die as a result … this didn’t help!

In the end I signed the waiver—not because I’d done the math and it made sense, but because that was what I was expected to do. 

Part of my issue was working out what was of value to me, and what was worth risking. Faced with the waiver, I was faced with weighing up the value of occasional headaches (which, incidentally, cleared up of their own accord) with the value of not being dead. Yet the most important value, it turned out, was that of not embarrassing myself in front of the people waiting to inject and scan me by refusing to sign. At that point (I am embarrassed to say) the shame of walking away was far more important to me than a one-in-a-million chance of dying!

What this incident reinforced with me is that what we consider to be important—and what we will do to protect this—is not always obvious, and doesn’t always align with a dispassionate analysis of the data. Perhaps it isn’t all that surprising that, when we make risk decisions, the importance or “value” of what we stand to lose becomes critical in the decision we make.

This is true for individuals, but it extends to organizations as well. While it’s easier for a business or a government agency (for example) to use evidence and scientific analysis in risk decisions, there are the equivalents of institutional heuristics and—critically—institutional ideas of what’s important, which heavily influence the decisions they make. As a result, what on the surface may look like a reticence to take risks that doesn’t seem to be based in logic, may actually be well-considered intent to avoid harm to something that’s value isn’t immediately apparent to outsiders. This may be profit or economic growth. But it may equally be brand identity, customer base, or even deeply embedded institutional values. And as a result, an organization may quite rationally decide that its reputation and identity are not worth risking at any cost—not because it’s risk-averse, but because the consequences of “identity death” are simply too important to be traded against gains in other areas.^[5]

This complexity around risk and decisions comes through in Naam’s “The Use of Things.” Here, what is really important—the hands-on human dimension of space exploration—is less tangible, and maybe less “sellable” institutionally, than the more overt goal of mining asteroids for water. Yet it is the value of having a real person on the mission that ultimately drives the risk decisions in the story.

In Ashby’s “Death on Mars,” a more subtle but perhaps more profound interplay of value and risk plays out. Here, we see risk in terms of mission value (establishing a Mars base), group value (trust and transparency), personal value (managing the process of dying), and conflicts between all three. Depending on how the story is approached, and where your sympathies lie as a reader, the risks—and the appropriateness of the decisions that are made—come across very differently. Should Donna have placed her right to die on her own terms above the mission goals? Was the risk of emotional pain to Khalidah that resulted from Donna concealing her illness worth what she gained from the deception? What would Song have risked by revealing what she knew? How important was the social “experiment” the crew was participating in, compared to what was important to each of them individually? 

These risk issues play out within a context that—in this case—is disconnected from centralized decision-making; presumably because of communication delays with Earth, but also possibly because of the nature of the mission. Within the context of the story, there is devolution of risk agency to the team orbiting Mars, and an expectation that risk decisions will align with established mission goals. This separation ends up amplifying the significance of each team member’s realization of what’s important to them (in effect, what is potentially at risk to each of them personally), and what they will do—or what they will trade—to protect this. 

What emerges is a complex risk landscape, where the risks include threats to dignity, integrity, and relationships. Within this landscape—one where someone will suffer no matter what is done—simply characterizing thinking and actions as “risk-averse” is not helpful. Instead, we should consider the degree to which individuals and the group as a whole are willing to contemplate and ultimately accept the consequences of actions, both to themselves and others. Risk in this instance is not a danger to be avoided, but an inevitability that reveals what the primary value is within a complex landscape, and what it is worth risking to sustain that value.

In this way, “Death on Mars” creates a scenario that illuminates the complexity and personal nature of many risk decisions, and forces us to closely examine risk’s fundamental nature as a threat to something of value or importance, where the “value” that’s relevant extends far beyond conventional metrics of risk, and isn’t always universally shared. This of course runs the “risk” of complicating decisions in the real world (imagine a regulator including interpersonal relationships in risk assessments—it’s hardly likely to make the process any easier). And yet, this broader understanding of risk is essential to better understanding the consequences of actions, and making informed decisions. It also opens the way to thinking differently about how we protect and increase what is of value—especially where, as in the case of “Death on Mars,” what is of value to those with the opportunity to protect it may differ from what’s of value to the organization they work for.

By approaching risk as a threat to value within a complex and interconnected landscape, risk conversations can be elevated from simplistic “go/no-go” options to conversation about how potential gains and losses in value may be balanced across all individuals and organizations affected by a decision. And this elevation in turn opens the door to creative and innovative approaches to protecting existing and future value. In “The Use of Things,” for instance, it’s the “how” of survival that becomes important. And in “Death on Mars,” it’s the “how” of death itself.

From Donna’s perspective in “Death on Mars,” what is important to her is a meaningful death, and her dignity in being able to have control over when and how she dies. This is a deeply personal value, and one that isn’t understood by her companions. It’s also directly in conflict with what is important to some of them, and in this respect, what reduces risk for Donna (in the sense of a threat to meaning, control, and dignity) increases risk for others. Whether her decision was appropriate or not depends on your perspective. Donna’s “risk” and her response to it, as well as the rest of the crew’s response, profoundly affects the evolving risk landscape in a way that couldn’t be captured in either evaluations of risk aversion, or simple numbers.

In Naam’s “The Use of Things,” we see another facet of risk that arises from approaching risk as a “threat to value.” In this case, it’s how thinking more broadly about potential consequences can lead to innovation in how risks are anticipated and managed. Here, the repurposing of the CALTROP mining bots to carry out a unique space rescue is interesting in two respects. Importantly, it makes visible a “hidden value” in the mission: the ultimate importance of preserving human life over the more overt need to demonstrate that water can be extracted from an asteroid. It also demonstrates a remarkable degree of anticipation and creativity in how the CALTROPs are programmed and designed with risk in mind. 

Reading Naam’s story, it has to be assumed that the communication time lag between the asteroid and Earth would have been too long for the CALTROPs to be remotely programmed in the time between Abrams being hit and his rescue. In other words, the machines must have been preprogrammed on Earth for such an eventuality. As part of the CALTROP design process, someone worked out that there was a possibility of a human operative becoming untethered in space, possibly with a compromised suit, and that it was worth building in a feature where the bots’ programming allowed them to prioritize human life over material extraction, coordinate their actions, and enact an improvised rescue mission.

This would have taken considerable resources, as well as some creative thinking around how the bots could be designed to respond to a threat to value under uncertain and unpredictable circumstances. Yet in a risk calculation in which human life holds the highest value, that anticipatory effort more than paid off. 

On a superficial reading, both Naam’s “The Use of Things” and Ashby’s “Death on Mars” can be interpreted as being about risk aversion—NASA’s aversion to risking human life and the mission, and Khalidah’s aversion to risking the death of a friend. But on a deeper read they help unpack the concept of risk from the perspective of what’s important to whom, and how existing and future value may be protected. And any illusion of risk aversion arises from a complex social calculus of what is worth fighting for. 

By focusing on the consequences of decisions and actions from multiple perspectives—something we are exploring at Arizona State University’s Risk Innovation Lab by thinking about risk as a “threat to current or future value”—^[6]both of these stories highlight the need and opportunities for creativity and innovation in how we think and act on risk. In today’s increasingly interconnected and technologically complex world, this is becoming ever more important, as conventional risk thinking becomes further disconnected from real-world challenges and opportunities. And perhaps nowhere is this more relevant than in the multi-constituency and value-laden domain of space exploration. 

Space has a unique place in our social psyche, and with increasing global connectivity, citizens are becoming more engaged—and more demanding—in what happens outside the Earth’s atmosphere and beyond. Add in the emergence of private space companies and evolving public-private partnerships—all with their own ideas of what constitutes “value”—and you have the makings of a highly complex and convoluted risk landscape.

When there were relatively few players in the space game, and critical decisions were largely the domain of government agencies, the concept of risk aversion might have had some value. As we move toward an increasingly complex web of players, though, it’s going to be increasingly important to understand risk from a different perspective.

Both Ashby and Naam capture the complexity of this shifting risk landscape well. Their stories jointly hint at what might be lost—or what future value threatened—by taking a rigid and outmoded approach to risk with space exploration. But they also reveal the possibilities of increasing future “value”—not just in terms of knowledge creation and wealth, but also in terms of social and personal value—by approaching risk in a more creative and nuanced way. In fact, rather than avoiding risk entirely, both authors offer insights into what may be achieved by working with risk, and making decisions that ultimately strengthen and protect what is most valued by the community, while avoiding consequences that undermine that value. 

Like myself, I suspect neither author buys into a simplistic idea of risk aversion. Rather, from these two stories, they support the concept of making smart decisions that protect what is valuable and important—not just to corporations and governments, but also to individuals and the communities they are a part of. This, I suspect, is an evolution of the old black-and-white mathematics of risk that will become increasingly important as we push the boundaries of space exploration, and weigh the many different types of values and voices that are tied up in reaching out into the solar system and beyond.

Acknowledgments: There’s something wonderfully satisfying about the serendipitous insights that come from “yes and” collaborations between creative writers and technical experts. I am deeply grateful to Ramez Naam and Madeline Ashby for their inspiring works, and for helping me see the world I thought I knew through new eyes.

Notes

^[1] An aversion to risk in this context is closely associated with “loss-aversion,” where people will tend to hold on to what they already have, rather than risking losing it to gain something else. [back]

^[2] Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011). [back]

^[3] For more on how we perceive and respond to risks, see Paul Slovic, The Feeling of Risk: New Perspectives on Risk Perception (London: Earthscan, 2010). [back]

^[4] The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report Communicating Science Effectively: A Research Agenda (2017) provides a good summary of what is known about how heuristics influence how people make sense of and use science-based information. The report is free to download at https://www.nap.edu/catalog/23674/communicating-science-effectively-a-research-agenda. [back]

^[5] The reality of corporate decision-making is, naturally, more complex than this, and involves an institutional “psychology” of decision-making that is often opaque. Yet institutional perceptions and articulations of “value” remain important in both informing decisions and weighing consequences. [back]

^[6] More information on how the Risk Innovation Lab is exploring risk from this perspective can be found at https://riskinnovation.asu.edu. [back]